An iOS 11.1 Glitch Is Replacing Vowels (mashable.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: We became privy to a new iPhone keyboard glitch after a few Mashable staffers recently started having issues with their iPhone keyboards, specifically with vowels. The issue started when iOS 11's predictive text feature began to display an odd character in the place of the letter "I," offering up "A[?] instead and autocorrecting within the message field...The bug was also covered by MacRumors, but it appears that my colleagues have even more issues than just the letter "I." One reported that they were also seeing the glitch with the letters "U" and "O" as well, making the problem strictly restricted to vowels. They also said the letters showed up oddly in iMessage on Mac devices, and shared some more screenshots of what the glitch looks like when they went through with sending a message. The glitch wasn't just limited to iMessage, however. My colleagues shared screenshots of their increasingly futile attempts to type out messages on Facebook Messenger...and Twitter.
Apple seems to be acknowledging that the iOS 11.1 glitch may affect iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. "Here's what you can do to work around the issue until it's fixed by a future software update," Apple posted on a support page, advising readers to "Try setting up Text Replacement for the letter 'i'."

Comments

Unicode gone awry

[MichaelJ]

The problematic sequence that gets generated is the capital I followed by the hex sequence ef b8 8f, which is known as Variation Selector 16. That's “An invisible codepoint which specifies that the preceding character should be displayed with emoji presentation. Only required if the preceding character defaults to text presentation.” So in a sense it's technically correct, it's trying to say to display an eye or eyes when you've typed an "I". The problem is twofold: a) people aren't trying to type emoji, and 2) it doesn't actually work.